Changes in latitude, changes in attitude….

Jimmy Buffett

As avid National Park aficionados (60% of the island is National Park), Saint John in the US Virgin Islands has been on our radar for quite a while. Now in retirement and having completed our Covid-19 vaccinations, the time was right for a trek.

First, a little about St. John. The tropical island is the third smallest of the US Virgin Islands with only 19 square miles. It is due east of Puerto Rico at 18° latitude (compare to Key West at 24.5°). Temperatures are in the mid-80s daytime and mid-70s nighttime year-round, and rain averages about 40 inches a year. As a US territory, the currency is the dollar, no passport is required, and US cell phone providers require no special plans. There are a few oddities associated with being a territory – islanders pay US income tax, but all monies collected stay on the island. There is no sales tax. It is also the only US state or territory where driving is on the left side of the road – something to consider when deciding to rent a car. It’s worth remembering most services (bus, taxi, ferry) and some stores are cash only. The airport is located on St. Thomas, requiring a ferry shuttle. This 20-minute ride runs many times a day and cost us $8.15 each for a one-way trip.

At the time of our trip, much of the world still had various restrictions in place to limit the spread of Covid-19. Those restrictions are, in part, the reason for us selecting St. John as a destination for this trip due to it being a US territory. Still, a negative Covid test was required within five days of entry, which required test results uploaded to a portal and test approval before coming to the island. There were no charges associated with any of this and everything was completed in about 24 hours. Hopefully, these requirements will be a thing of the past as Covid vaccination efforts continue.

We booked a room at the St. John Inn in Cruz Bay for a week (https://stjohninn.com). This isn’t the cheapest vacation you can take, but you only retire once. This brightly painted, conveniently located hotel is a short walk from the ferry dock and all the downtown Cruz Bay shops and restaurants. The hotel offers a variety of room sizes and amenity levels. They serve a decent breakfast with no cooked offerings such as eggs or bacon but with a good selection of bagels, oatmeal, waffles, muffins, fruit, etc. The afternoon complimentary rum punch happy hour was a big hit and a great opportunity to mingle with other guests. In fact, I can’t ever recall staying anywhere that I met so many of the other guests in friendly conversations. We paid $250/night for a suite that included a kitchenette and a balcony porch. One advertisement said they were the only lodging in the downtown area with a swimming pool. I didn’t validate that, and it wasn’t a big pool, but we enjoyed it several afternoons. Snorkel masks, fins, coolers, etc. were also provided to guests.

As a Caribbean Island, the history isn’t much different than others in the area. Christopher Columbus checked in in 1493, and Europeans started settling in the area in the early 1600s. To aid the natives in their enlightenment and help them in optimizing the potential of the island, advance their culture, and maximize productivity, they were elevated to slave status. They were slow to recognize the benefit of this arrangement and saw fit to rebel from time to time. After much back and forth and changing of hands between colonial powers (French, Danes, British) the US government bought the islands for $25M in 1917. The islands were made a territory in 1952 (a sort of friends with limited benefits arrangement), and that’s where they are today.

We didn’t rent a car on this trip. The thought behind that was the island is small, and there are taxis as well as a bus system. That didn’t work out so well. Even though the island is small, the roads were not built with pedestrians in mind. People drive fast on narrow windy roads with generally no shoulder available (except in town), discouraging walking. Taxis are available and not unreasonable (for example, a taxi for the two of us from Cruz to Maho Beach was $14), but not especially convenient. They are modified vans and trucks and typically carry up to 18 people. Because of this, they congregate at high traffic areas and don’t usually leave until they can get several customers on board. Your ability to return can be severely limited if you visit somewhere off the main stops. Buses aren’t any better. They are cheap – you can cross the entire island for a buck per person, but they don’t run very often, and the stops aren’t very frequent. You are completely dependent on luck to try and catch one anywhere except at an established stop.

With these travel challenges in mind, we had to modify our beach visits a bit. Honeymoon Beach was an acceptable walk (about a mile each way) from our hotel. It was a lovely beach where we found a nice shady spot and had the best fish viewing while snorkeling of any beach we visited. We took taxis to other beaches. Maho Beach was reported to be a go-to spot for finding sea turtles due to having the sea grass beds they like to graze on, and we weren’t disappointed. Both of us saw several up close. Trunk Bay was a spectacular beach from the perspective of a wide beach with brilliant blue water (sandy bottom with limited sea grass near the beach). Taken all around, we thoroughly enjoyed our beach visits, and didn’t feel like we were shortchanged too much with our travel limits. Seeing ‘everything’ was not an objective for this week. I added a bonus hike up to Caneel Hill on our way back from Honeymoon Beach one day, a 676-foot climb to a high point on the west end of the island. I sweated a bucket but was rewarded with a beautiful vista in all directions.

A note about the beaches and sunscreen use: on March 30, 2020, the US Virgin Islands officially banned sunscreen containing the “toxic 3 O’s.”  The chemicals oxybenzone, octinoxate and octocrylene are the active ingredients in MANY sunscreens. If you bring sunscreen with you from the mainland, there is a good chance it contains one or more of these chemicals proven to damage coral reefs. Hawaii and Key West have now banned sunscreens with these chemicals as well. From my observation of beach activities, it is extremely unlikely that a person using these would be caught or punished, still, don’t be one of “those” people.

The island was not as lush green as I anticipated. I assumed this was due to the two Category 5 hurricanes 12 days apart in 2017 but found out they are suffering from a multi-year drought as well. Most of the businesses are back in business following the hurricanes but damage is still apparent in several spots. Covid-19 was a cruel follow-up to those natural disasters on an island that relies on tourism for over half of its economy. I sensed tension in some of the locals as they deal with a reality that both relies on tourists for income while having to deal with those same tourists anxious to shed the masks still required in many mainland locations. 

We took the bus to the east end of the island one afternoon just to see the sites. It’s a small island but has some decent elevation – Mt. Bordeaux in the National Park reaches 1286 feet. The east end seemed to have a dryer landscape, and none of the beaches we saw seemed as nice as the string of beaches on the north shore. The 18-passenger bus was new and comfortable. The roads themselves – not so much.

Dining on the island was typical resort food and pricing for the most part. We enjoyed our dinners – and to be fair we couldn’t get reservations at the most highly rated restaurants – but the best food we had was from roadside food trucks. The best meal we probably had was island food purchased for lunch at a small roadside stand, “Comida Latina”. We pointed at items we wanted from the attendant (partly because of loud music and partly because of a language barrier) for a meal of beans, rice, shrimp, peppers, onions, and slaw that couldn’t be beat. We also sampled Marie’s fried chicken sold from a roadside converted sealand shipping container and advertised by customers as the best on the island. We were served straight from the frying pan out of this tiny kitchen with no menu. It had been a long time since I had true skillet-fried chicken, and this was indeed tasty. Grilled Mahi-mahi sandwiches from a food truck at Honeymoon Beach far exceeded my expectations.

A week was a good length for this trip. I got caught up on my Jimmy Buffett, checked off another National Park, and had a splendid time snorkeling in a huge school of fish and staring at a turtle from close range. I wiggled my toes in a lot of sand and floated in the surf under a blue sky with my sweetie. I’m very glad we came and might come back again but I didn’t find an urge to move to the islands. Many folks we met seem to have this vacation as an annual ritual. Others tour the islands by boat which may offer a different perspective. We had a fine time, but in my opinion, there are lots of other spots in this splendid world that we haven’t seen yet I’d like to check out first before a return trip.